ABSTRACT
In his 'General Introduction for My Work', William Butler Yeats insisted on the importance of traditional formal and metrical elements in lyric poetry:
all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt ... If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of selfcontempt because of my egotism and indiscretion, and foresee the boredom of my reader. I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional ... Ancient salt is best packing.
